The letters you are reading reached Rome through a Greek colony near Naples
The Latin alphabet, now the most widely used on Earth, began as a local Greek script brought to Italy by settlers at Cumae. The Etruscans borrowed it, and from their version came Latin letters. Cumae was one of dozens of Greek cities in southern Italy, a region later called Magna Graecia, Greater Greece.
Greeks settled southern Italy from the 8th century BC, driven by famine, overcrowding, civil strife, exile and the search for new ports. Euboeans came first, planting Pithecusae on the island of Ischia, regarded as the earliest Greek foothold in Italy, and then Cumae across the water on the mainland. Achaeans followed shortly before 720 BC along the Ionian coast, founding Sybaris and Kroton among others. Unlike Roman colonies, these were fully independent city-states, and many soon founded daughter cities of their own.
They prospered spectacularly. Sybaris may have held between 300,000 and 500,000 people in the century before 510 BC. Athletes from Kroton alone won 18 Olympic titles across 25 Games, and in town planning and architecture the colonies sometimes outdid Greece itself. The name first surfaces around 150 BC in the historian Polybius, who credited it to Pythagoras and his followers. Wealth bred rivalry, and in the 6th century the cities fought one another; Kroton destroyed Sybaris around 510 BC.
Rome absorbed them in stages. Neàpolis, today's Naples, was the first to join, in 327 BC. After Rome defeated Taras in the Pyrrhic War in 272 BC, most southern cities were bound by treaties. Syracuse stayed independent under the loyal king Hiero II, until his grandson sided with Hannibal and the city fell in 212 BC. Many other cities that had defected to Hannibal were annexed in 205 BC, and Roman veterans were settled among them.
Greek culture outlasted Greek independence. Roman ways only fully took hold by the 1st century AD, and inscriptions show Greek still thriving until then. Most inhabitants became Latin speakers in the Middle Ages, yet the Griko communities of Calabria and Salento still speak Griko, the last living remnant of that Greek world.
Source: Magna Graecia
